Introduction
Since June 2015, I have offered Rolfing sessions. Approaching the fascia brings the posture into order, and the movement of the body improves along with it. This time, I would like to introduce a testimonial from a sixth Rolfing session.
Working with the Deep Muscles — What Settles?
Sessions 4 to 7 of Rolfing bring the medial line into order. Why the work in the depth matters is that it brings you to “Where am I taking my life? What is it for?” — and that reaches how a person lives, and what they feel, in a large way.
Sessions 4 to 7 proceed in the following order.
Session 4: the lower body (the adductors through to the pelvic floor)
Session 5: the front of the spine in the upper body (the psoas, the viscera, the diaphragm)
Session 6: the back of the spine in the upper body (the lower leg, the gluteals, the sacrum, the spine)
Session 7: the shoulders and the whole neck
Drawn out, it looks like this.
What Is the Sacrum?
The sixth session attends to the back of the spine, and to the sacrum and the coccyx in particular.
The sacrum is part of the pelvis. It sits at the end of the spine, at the center of the body. Because it is joined to the spine, when the sacrum goes out of true the center goes with it, and the rest of the spine is likely to follow.
The sacrum is also joined by ligament to the leg — the lower limb, the femur. And the pelvis itself is wrapped around and around in ligament, like plastic wrap. You can read from this how the pelvis, the spine, and the leg are connected, and how much that matters for stability.
The pelvis is made up of the hip bones — the ilium, the pubis, and the ischium — and all of them are joined.
When I say in a session that the sacrum moves with the breath, people are often surprised. It does move, and in people whose breathing is shallow that movement tends to be smaller.
The Second Chakra and the Sacrum — Relationships and the Social
The sacrum sits just where the second chakra is said to be. This is a term from another system, but it is held to be involved with relationships, with feeling, with wanting things, with sexuality. What I have seen is that when this part begins to move, the face softens, feelings find words, and something in the person wants to make things.
I take the point of bringing the medial line into order to be that, through bodily sensation, a person comes to have their own basis for judging things. The sixth session, I think, helps with something adjacent to that: the part of us that lives among other people.
BEFORE and AFTER
With Tasuku Suzuki, a pharmacist, I worked with the fascia of the muscles around the sacrum and the sacroiliac joint — the lower leg, the gluteals, and so on — so that those could move more freely.
Before the session (BEFORE), the body, the face included, sat forward of the spine; after it (AFTER), with support coming through the back, the face has come to rest where it belongs, without the chest being pushed out — as I think can be seen.
Conclusion
This time I have shared the experience of a sixth Rolfing session.